No.
Have you ever considered the value of laying out your argument, as opposed to demanding your opponent fill in details?
I suspect you have, and I suspect you are aware that it’s to your benefit to leave these little unsaid assumptions in place, allowing you to disavow them later if necessary.
But I may be wrong. You may simply be unwilling, unable, or baffled by the whole concept. No matter.
Two responses:
(a) even if both sides were equally angry, when there’s a pit thread started by one side that is full of anger, well, then there’s a pit thread that’s full of anger, with the predictable shitstorm that results from it. Whatever point I’ve tried to make about going into an angry pit thread and debating in it would apply just as well if there were two parallel pit threads, one from each side, both equally angry. If both sides are full of angry people, and you happen to be personally calm, wading into a bunch of angry people and trying to point out where they’re wrong is likely to end in shouting.
(b) it’s pretty silly to say that being accused of something monstrous is as bad as doing something monstrous. If the liberals are right, then Republicans are stealing elections by disenfranchising poor people, and the liberals are VERY aggrieved. If the liberals are wrong, then the Republicans are being incorrectly accused of something bad. Which is bad, but WAY less bad than stealing elections. (More on this “if they are right” construction below.)
No, I’m saying “IF we’re correct, we have much more reason to be upset”, which is what everyone is missing in these bizarre digressions about FDR. A large number of intelligent and well-meaning liberals honestly and in good faith believed that what Bush did was to invade and conquer another country based on something somewhere between a lie and false pretenses. His actions cost a huge amount of money, a lot of American lives, a LOT LOT of Iraqi lives, and a huge amount of American moral authority in the international community. So, based on that view, a lot of people were very angry at him.
Even if you disagree with that view, and believe that eventually history will prove you to be correct, I hope you can at least acknowledge that none of those ideas are ludicrous fantasies, they are at least prima facie reasonable, and honestly held by reasonable people.
I know of no similar remotely reasonable accusations ever leveled at Bill Clinton.
A clearer analogy is the 2000 election. Your side WON. Therefore it stands to reason that in debates shortly after the election was finally settled the other side would be angrier than your side, right? (I mean, I don’t think I’m making any particularly deep or subtle point here…) So in a thread shortly after the 2000 election, it would nearly certainly have been the case that your opponents would be angrier and less civil than people on your side, and this wouldn’t be evidence of moral failing on their part.
Sure, if some time in 2007 you had started a thread saying “I believe we should have voter ID laws”, and laid out your reasons for doing so, it would have been reasonable to respond to precisely what you were saying and no more.
But you did not. Rather, you posted your views not only at a time in American history when there are a particular set of voter ID laws being discussed, those laws existing in a particular context; but you posted those views in a pit thread SPECIFICALLY DISCUSSING THOSE PARTICULAR LAWS!!!
Irony, thy name is Bricker… this (not laying out your argument) is PRECISELY something I have accused you of multiple times in this and other threads.
I have repeatedly laid out my argument. You have ignored it, and focused on tangents, like bringing up FDR vs. Bush. You pretended to not understand it, just like you pretended to not understand the word need.
The fact is you have already lost this debate, several times, and you’re so enamored of this issue that you refuse to admit it. So instead you dance and caper and try with all your might to make the debate about something else.
Are we gonna go on a tangent about how I insulted your femurs now?
Now circling back to answer this:
Yes, people are “allowed” to rant with ambiguity in the Pit, and I am equally “allowed” to point out their ambiguity, because ranting in the Pit is no less a method of persuasive writing than a GD thread is – it simply uses different techniques.
I’m about to unironically use a phrase that I feel rests on questionable theory, but here goes: your perception comes from a position of privilege.
On the SDMB, where the liberal viewpoint is so dominant, several of your posts, including this one, have taken for granted that the liberal view is to be accorded a more advantageous baseline position than the conservative one. You have averred that it’s more understandable that insults were hurled against Bush and not against Clinton – after all, Bush was worse; we all know this. Ambiguous ranting in the Pit ought to be tolerated – but of course a conservative rant in the Pit of similar ambiguity would be picked apart instantly, so that, too, leverages the privilege.
You even built a solid case for your own efforts being spent ameliorating my approach rather than pacifying the masses – and I also say that unironically. Your position was perfectly correct. But it exists in the overarching context of an environment in which the liberal position is so default, so assumed to be correct that you are genuinely surprised when axioms of it are questioned.
Without going to back to look I must say that my impression was always that the objections were to specific implementations specifically setting the ID required such that it would be more difficult for a percentage of the population to obtain.
No, I haven’t lost this debate. States have Voter ID laws - those laws are in effect and enforced.
If this debate isn’t won by that fact, then I guarantee you i win it on points.
The only way I don’t win this debate is if you’re the judge.
Then… isn’t it incumbent on you to actually identify one or more of those specific implementations?
That’s okay. I do the same when I think someone on my side is wrong.
In this case, however, whether he was talking about other things is irrelevant, since the point to the story is that he flat-out wouldn’t believe that Voter ID was an issue, because he couldn’t believe that anyone would disagree with a positive ID requirement at the voting station. He assumed they already had to show photo ID or some other positive identification, because anything else really doesn’t make a lot of sense.
As I said, identifying yourself as a citizen when you vote should be considered a obvious requirement to build an electoral system that people trust, and in Canada I don’t think there’s any disagreement about that on any side. And frankly, that’s probably because no political faction has discovered a way to turn the issue into an electoral advantage.
Don’t know about you guys, but my personal sense of honor demands that I abjectly surrender. I have looked it up, and it is entirely true that FDR was largely responsible for the WWII Lend-Lease Program. Which proves, without question, the FDR was a bloodthirsty monster far, far worse than GeeDubya, but not nearly so bad as Clinton, who got a blowjob. Several of them, in fact!
Seeing as my entire case about the perfidy and dishonesty of the Republicans in this depended solely and entirely on the “fact” that GeeDubya was worse than FDR, I have no honorable recourse but to surrender, and acknowledge that Bricker’s case is irrefutable, its clarity, probity, and certainty undeniable.
Damn! Outsmarted again!
The law here in Pennsylvania was struck down as unconstitutional.
Neener neener neener, bitch! I win.
Yes, that’s all Clinton was - a horndog. Everything else he did was just perfect, right?
Just out of curiosity, where do you stand on the Rwanda bodycount? You do know that Canada was on the forefront of pushing the U.N. to intervene to prevent a genocide, and the primary opposition to that came from the Clinton administration, right? So, how many dead Rwandans do you lay at Clinton’s feet? Bear in mind that even Clinton agrees that he made a huge mistake. In his own words, “I blew it.” Usually that’s something you only hear from his female underlings.
What’s Obama’s bodycount tally in your book? Aside from all the drone kills, how do you tally up his support of revolutions in Egypt, Syria, and Libya, and the chaos that has ensued? How many thousands of lives do you count against him? Or is it only Republicans who are at fault for the death toll in civil wars they help start?
So… You have no problem with Voter ID, you only have problem with requiring anyone to go through the process to get such an ID? Isn’t that convenient.
But maybe I’m not getting it: Just what part of that process is too difficult? What kind of voter ID would you accept?
Again, we prove who we are when we register to vote. Do you understand this? Yes or no?
It makes a lot of sense because it works very fucking well. This is evidenced by the excruciatingly low level of in-person voter fraud. The proof and the pudding.
It makes sense because we don’t have any form of universal photo ID.
It makes sense because we allow voting in absentia, which does not provide an opportunity to show ID, and which nobody on the right or left wants to do away with.
Oddly enough, down here the aspects of voting that engender distrust have nothing to do with anything that would be cured by such laws. Now, as you’re such a smart fellow, what do you think those other things are, and why do they exist? And do you or do you not think that adding voter ID laws here has a real negative effect on participation in democracy, while eliminating no real problem whatsoever?
There’s no disagreement there on any side about universal health care, is there? And it comes with free ID’s for everyone, right? So no problem exists or would be created if the ID requirement were eliminated, right?
Try adding some relevance to your posts, and taking out the absurd partisan cheerleading on matters that affect *you *not at all, and you might actually find yourself making a contribution instead of a distraction.
That’s just asinine. The fact that it is a law is irrelevant as to whether it’s a good law or not. Someone debating slavery in 1855 didn’t automatically lose if he was anti.
The very idea betrays such colossal twattery that I wonder how you don’t attract sailors on leave.
As for points, your position is incoherent. You want to stop a handful of fraudulent in-person votes by making it harder for thousands of people, mostly of one party to vote. Your solution makes the problem, skewed elections, worse. You silly bitch.
Or if it’s judged on the rational merits.
I think your electoral system has all kinds of features that engender distrust - largely because it’s been heavily politicized by both sides and used for political advantage by both sides, and both sides fire accusations of malfeasance back and forth and help further undermine your system.
I think you guys are completely nuts in the way you organize your elections. Your ballots are often stupid, your electronic voting machines are prone to abuse and failure, your haphazard vote counting and storage of ballots is idiotic.
Here in Canada, it’s pretty simple. You register to vote in your neighborhood. You’re assigned a polling station. You walk in on election day, give your ID, they cross you off the list and hand you a paper ballot. You fill it in and give it back to the clerk, who runs it through a tally machine right in front of you. The paper ballot goes into storage, and you’re done. There’s always a paper record that can be tracked back to the vote tally in case there’s a dispute. There are no punch cards, no hanging chads, none of that nonsense. If you retrieve a ballot for inspection, it will be obvious whether or not it’s valid because you simply write a big X in a circle next to your candidate.
But why be logical when you can find another issue for partisans on both sides to line up against and start sniping at each other?
Of course there is. We argue about our health care choices all the time. Some provinces privatize more services than others, and waiting lists are a subject of regular conversation.
If you don’t show your health care card when you go to the hospital, you will be billed for the services.
As for using your health care card to vote, the only way you can do that is if you have a secondary source of identification that only the real person should have access to, and which matches the name on the health care card. A bank statement, a government check, that sort of thing. Or, you can get a public trustee to certify your identity. But none of it is easy. You can’t walk into a voting station with your health card and expect to vote.
I thought I did - I suggested that you guys adopt our election rules. (-:
But if you want another positive suggestion, how about this: Republicans seem most worried about people voting multiple times or illegal aliens voting, so their prime issue is requiring real identification to vote. You claim that this isn’t your issue, but that you’re worried about various other means of voter suppression. So why don’t you compromise?
Would you support a bill that mandated reasonably foolproof positive voter ID in exchange for other reforms to curb whatever shenanigans you think Republicans are up to? How about a bill that says everyone must have photo-ID, coupled with funding to provide a free ID card to anyone who needs one? Or a bill that extends voting hours for people that have proper ID? If Voter ID per se truly isn’t a problem, I’m sure you can figure out some way to include it in a bill that gets you the things you want.
How do you do that? What’s the requirement?
I’m not convinced that the level is ‘excruciatingly low’, whatever that means. But of course, if your identification methods are weak, it might be hard to prove one way or the other. That’s why voter ID is a good idea if for no reason than to build public trust in the fairness of the electoral system.
Neither do we. The only two forms of photo ID I have are my driver’s license and passport - Oh, and my Costco card…
Gee, we have voting in absentia here too, and you DO have to provide ID:
You have to photocopy the ID and send it along with your registration for an absentee ballot, and you have to do this well in advance of the election so it can be vetted. You also have to provide a physical home address, which must match your identification. So homeless people aren’t getting absentee ballots.
I move the thread (which by now has long gone from a pitting of election-biasing Republicans to a pitting of Bricker) be tabled until November, at which point we can count the number of disenfranchisement stories. If they exceed 20, I move we run Bricker out of town on a rail or sacrifice him to our god or at the very least mock him (and his family) mercilessly.